High-Ranking Communist Rebel Is Arrested in Philippines

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Members of the New People’s Army, a Communist rebel group in the Philippines, in December. The group has about 5,000 fighters, the Philippine military says.CreditCreditMark R. Cristino/European Pressphoto Agency

By Felipe Villamor

Feb. 1, 2018

MANILA — The Philippine police said on Thursday that they had arrested a top leader of the country’s decades-old Communist insurgency, in the latest signal that President Rodrigo Duterte is not interested in resuming the peace talks he halted last year.

The rebel leader, Rafael Baylosis, 69, was arrested along with an aide on Wednesday in Quezon City, a northern suburb of Manila. The military says Mr. Baylosis is one of the top leaders of the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the underground Communist Party of the Philippines.

The arrest was the first of a Communist leader since Mr. Duterte called off peace negotiations with the insurgents in November. He has accused the rebels of using the talks as a cover to stage attacks, including one that left a young girl dead.

The police said on Thursday that Mr. Baylosis and his aide, Guillermo Roque, had been spotted by officers on a surveillance mission and that they had been “armed and suspicious looking.” They fled but were captured, and the officers seized handguns and ammunition from them, according to the police.

Karapatan, a left-leaning human rights group, demanded that the men be released, arguing that Mr. Baylosis was suffering from a heart ailment and posed no threat to the public. The group’s secretary general, Cristina Palabay, also noted that Mr. Baylosis had been named as a consultant to the peace negotiations by the National Democratic Front, the rebels’ political wing.

Mr. Baylosis was among dozens of rebel leaders who were released from prison in 2016, during the leadup to the peace talks. He had been serving a sentence for murder and rebellion.

“The government has again focused its efforts on the prosecution of peace consultants,” Ms. Palabay said. “Instead of working to resolve the roots of the armed conflict by way of pursuing peace talks, the Duterte regime has instead resorted to fascist reprisals.”

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Rafael Baylosis, far right, was among the rebels released from prison in 2016 so they could participate in peace talks.CreditTed Aljibe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ms. Palabay also said the arrests were illegal because both men had been covered by an agreement guaranteeing rebel negotiators immunity from arrest. But Mr. Duterte’s spokesman, Harry Roque, said that agreement was no longer valid because the talks had been suspended.

“The president is not interested to talk peace to those who do not sincerely desire peace,” said Mr. Roque, who is not related to Mr. Baylosis’ aide.

A small group of activists protested Thursday morning outside the national police headquarters in Manila, where the men were being held, demanding that they be freed.

The Philippines’ Communist insurgency began in 1969, making it one of the longest-running conflicts in Asia. Over the decades, tens of thousands of people have been killed in the fighting. The Philippine military says the New People’s Army currently has about 5,000 fighters.

Mr. Duterte, an authoritarian who often calls himself a leftist, began moving toward peace talks with the rebels soon after taking office in 2016. In college, Mr. Duterte was a student of Jose Maria Sison, the founder of the country’s Communist Party, who now lives in self-imposed exile in the Netherlands.

Mr. Sison initially welcomed the peace overtures, but he later called Mr. Duterte a “hoodlum” and a coward for backing out of the talks.

The detention of Mr. Baylosis and his aide came two weeks after a Manila court issued arrest warrants for three other rebel consultants involved in the talks, who had been released from prison in 2016 along with Mr. Baylosis. The three, none of whom have been apprehended, had been serving sentences for murder in connection with killings committed in the 1980s.